WENATCHEE, Wash. — Thirty-one-year-old Christopher Scott Wilson will spend the next 14 years and 3 months in prison after accepting a plea deal Wednesday in the killing of Mackenzie Cowell, the Wenatchee World reported.
Thirty-one-year-old Christopher Scott Wilson had been charged with first-degree murder in the February 2010 death of Mackenzie Cowell and pleaded down to a first-degree manslaughter conviction. Jury selection was under way at his trial.
Wilson also pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery, as well as second-degree assault on another woman.
Cowell was a 17-year-old high school senior who told her beauty school classmates she would be gone for 15 minutes just before she walked to her car and drove off. Police found her body four days later. She had been struck in the head, strangled and stabbed to death.
Police found Cowell’s blood in the carpet of Wilson’s Wenatchee apartment. Duct tape near her body was stained with her blood and genetic material that matched Wilson’s paternal DNA type.